MODELLING LANGUAGE COMPETITION: BILINGUALISM AND COMPLEX SOCIAL NETWORKS

摘要

In the general context of dynamics of social consensus, we study an agent based model for the competition between two socially equivalent languages, addressing the role of bilingualism andsocial structure. In a regular network, we study the formation of linguistic domains and their interaction across the boundaries. We also analyse the dynamics on a small world network andon a network with community structure. In all cases, a final scenario of dominance of one lan-guage and extinction of the other is obtained (dominance-extinction state). In comparison withthe regular network, smaller times for extinction are found in the small world network. In thenetwork with communities instead, the average time for extinction does not give a characteristic time for the dynamics, and metastable states are observed at all time scales.